Re: [GNUnet-developers] How does the history works in the pubsub service

[Mildred Ki'Lya]

On Sat, 8 Sep 2018 10:26:36 +0200
xrs <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi Mildred,
> 
> > I'm interested in what the gnunet pubsub service does, in particular
> > the place history. Is it just a history gathered by the pubsub
> > service? Is it synchronized across the network? Can I get the history
> > of past messages of a place before I joined (as guest or owner)? If
> > so, how is the history stored in the network. As a user of the pubsub
> > service, and owner of a place, can I store the history of that place
> > somewhere safe and be sure that's is shared across the network?  
> 
> I can not speak of the current GNUnet implementation we have, because
> it was not possible for us to verify the functionality, so I'll speak
> about the concept. Every pubsub channel has its own history. The
> channel owner can set a policy to control access and restrict the
> history log. The history is stored in the pubsub service.

You mean, it's supposed to be stored in the pubsub service, in RAM
only? If I want to make a blog with this technology, I need to ensure
it's written to disk somewhere safe, and even if all nodes go offline
for some reason, the history can go back up online. Is that use case
intended to be supported?

> Messages are
> distributed within the channel members and stored locally in a database.
> Depending on the channel policy messages can be replayed (which
> is the history). Apart from this there exists a distributed channel
> state which contextualizes the channel. This one is also stored in the
> database and will be synchronized (across the network, more precise:
> the channel) when joining the channel and if the state changes. 

What could be nice is to have an interface to the pubsub service that
allows another gnunet service to store the history of placed owned by
the node, on disk or on a database, and have the ability to feed back
the history of a place when needed back to the pubsub service.

In a word, separate the RAM storage of the history in the pubsub
service and put that in another service.

Would this makes sense ?

Mildred